E.3.1 The Freudian engine and the Marxist-Leninist train - Pt. XV - Excerpt from the essay «Money, Revolution and Acceleration in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

chapteR iii

For an Erotica of the Revolution

Solution to the molecular questions 4 and 5

“We realized that we couldn't just hook a Freudian engine up to the Marxist-Leninist train” (DI, 216).

The Freudian engine and the Marxist-Leninist train

Guattari’s jokes positions the authors of
the Anti-Œdipus in-between the Freudian theory of desire and Marxist political theory. Desire for Deleuze and Guattari cannot be simply the sum of Marxism and Freudism: “The relations of production and those of reproduction participate in the same pairing of productive forces and anti- productive structures. We wanted to move desire into the infrastructure, on the side of production, while we moved the family, the ego, and the individual on the side of anti- production. This is the only way to ensure that sexuality is not completely cut off from the economy.”(DI, 216-7).
In response to the fourth molecular question on how a politico-philosophical reflection on the real can conjugate in a coherent design both economic and revolutionary dimensions, it is important to isolate a few concepts expressed in the accelerationist passage of the Civilized Capitalist Machine. What meaning do «economy», «value», «money» and «revolutionary subject» hold in Deleuze and Guattari? And in Nietzsche and Klossowski? To describe the discouragement of the human being in the process of normalisation in XIX century society, Nietzsche uses economical categories like «exploitation», «luxury», «management» to testify that his thoughts overstep both the traditional concept of liberal economy (Smith, Ricardo, Mill) and their political expression, which is to say the Marxist concept of economics. In his view, Economy leads to a mediocritisation of man and demands a reaction in the form of a counter-movement “aimed to bring to light a stronger species, a higher type of overman”. (NVC, 160-1). In Circulus Vitiosus Klossowski analyses Nietzsche’s vision of excess, otherwise known as plus value: “What Nietzsche discerns in the actual state of affairs is that men of excess, those who create, now and from the outset, the meaning of the values of existence (a very paradoxical configuration for Nietzsche) form, so to speak, an occult hierarchy for which the supposed hierarchy of current labourers does all the work. They are precisely the real slaves, the ones who do the greatest labour.” (CV, 36). There is another important consequence resulting from the comparison between gregariousness and singularity in the economic movement of «wrong Darwinian selection», that Klossowski argues and comments with the following words: “From this point of view, the singular case represents a forgetting of previous experiences, which are either assimilated to the gregarious impulses by being relegated to the unconscious, and thus reprimanded by the reigning censure;

or on the contrary, are rejected as being unassimilable to the conditions required for the existence of both the species and the individual within the species. For Nietzsche, the singular case rediscovers, in an 'anachronistic' manner, an ancient way of existing - whose reawakening in itself presupposes that present conditions do not correspond to the impulsive state which is in some manner being affirmed through it. Depending on the strength of its intensity, however, this singular state, though anachronistic in relation to the institutional level of gregariousness, can bring about a de-actualization of that institution itself and denounce it in turn as anachronistic. That every reality as such comes to be de-actualized in relation to the singular case, that the resulting emotion seizes the subject's behaviour and forces it into action - this is an adventure that can modify the course of events, following a circuit of chance that Nietzsche will make the dimension of his thought. To the extent that he isolates its periodicity in history, the plan for a conspiracy appears under the sign of the vicious Circle.” (NVC, 80) The comment is explosive: it implies an irreconcilable fracture between singularity on an institutional level. He is saying that the communities of non-assimilated human beings will form new institutions with new forms: non-institutions or post-institutions rather than reformed institutions. Nietzsche assumes that dark forces operate on human nature thanks to the theory of will to power and with the help of a selective doctrine: he calls it Eternal Return; Klossowski calls it the Vicious Circle. In this context, the same doctrine becomes a tool for conspiracy. Nietzsche’s anti-darwinian attitude is here very clear inasmuch the implications brought about by the selective doctrines or the instinctual impulses are antithetical to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Deleuze and Guattari are absorbed by the implications developed by Klossowski’s post-institutional gregarious scenario. The communities of singularities may use the liberation of impulse to make mortal what seems immortal: the gregarious society and its institutions. In the Anti-Œdipus the two philosophers state: “The revolutionary pole of group fantasy becomes visible, on the contrary, in the power to experience institutions themselves as mortal, to destroy them or change them according to the articulations of desire and the social field, by making the death instinct into a veritable institutional creativity. For that is precisely the criterion—at least the formal criterion— that distinguishes the revolutionary institution from the enormous inertia which the law communicates to institutions in an established order. As Nietzsche says; churches, armies, States—which of all these dogs wants to die?” (AO, 62-3) 

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